You have to be prepared for anything in the huge souk of Damascus. It might have the Arabic equivalent of Harrods’ food hall, with amazing ice creams, sweets and pastries, but you’re also confronted by medicinal shops with dried crocodiles and cured deerskins.

When you tire of this amazing spectacle, you can walk through the columns and archways of the remains of a gigantic Roman temple to Jupiter, now occupied by the 8th-century Great Umayyad Mosque, which incorporates an earlier church.

Grand: Abraham is alleged to have visited the enormous citadel at Aleppo.

Most people probably imagine Syria is not for the faint-hearted - it was once on President George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ shortlist. For a tourist, though, the reality is quite different. Syria is one of the safest and most welcoming countries I’ve ever visited.

In the remotest villages, children picked spring flowers and shyly offered bouquets to my wife.

Combine that with the ease of travel throughout the country, with its hundreds of staggeringly well-preserved ancient sites, and you begin to understand why travellers’ antennae have tuned in to Syria.

In Damascus, we stayed in the Talisman, a perfectly restored townhouse in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

We spent our first full day wandering through the alleyways and drinking coffee in the charmingly ornate Al Nawfara Coffee Shop, with its raised platform and comfortable armchair for the Arabic storyteller who comes each evening.

Damascus skyline: The Grand Mosque is one of the world's largest mosques and is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The city has all the treasures of the National Museum, and numerous palaces, but we were impatient to get on the road and head north to the Krak des Chevaliers, the great Crusader castle.

Perched on its own levelled hill, this looming fortress looks like a stone battleship. Lawrence of Arabia thought it ‘perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’.

Though it eventually fell to Arab forces, the new masters never defaced it, so the internal rooms and churches are intact.

North of here is Apamea, Syria’s largest classical site, with a colonnaded street more than a mile long. The remains of a four-mile-long wall surround it, and apart from some shepherds we had it entirely to ourselves. Wheel ruts from chariots said to have transported Antony and Cleopatra when they visited on their honeymoon in 37BC are still visible.

Sightseeing by camel: A local guide at the ruins of Palmyra

Shortly after leaving Apamea, you pass a handful of ruined castles and enter the ‘Lost Cities’ zone. This consists of hundreds of abandoned towns and cities dating from the fourth to sixth centuries AD.

These were some of the most prosperous places in the Ancient World. Northern Syria was the largest producer of olive oil. There was also a thriving wine trade. But during the upheavals at the end of the Roman era and around the time of the arrival of Islam, whole regions were simply abandoned.

One of the largest - and perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful - is Bara. The area has been replanted with olive groves, which surround the substantial ruins.

In spring, the greenery is carpeted with glorious splashes of colour from poppies and scented jasmine. On our visit, small groups of Syrian families were having picnics. One group beckoned our guide, who said they wished to discover a secret from my wife. ‘They want to know how you manage to keep your legs so smooth and white,’ he said.

The next port of call was Aleppo - some historians believe it’s the last example of a traditional Ottoman city, with its large population of Muslims, a dozen different Christian sects and even 30 or so Jews.

Splendour: The ruins of the Basilica of St Simeon in the hills near Aleppo.

We ate at Zmorod, the best restaurant in town, where a plasma screen showed Stuttgart playing Barcelona at football. Next to us, a Catholic bishop, wearing a crucifix and a gold Rolex, drank Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky.

There is enough in Aleppo to keep you busy for a day or two, what with the enormous citadel which Abraham is alleged to have visited and a souk even more exotic than the one in Damascus.

The rather rundown Barons Hotel, which was the temporary home of Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie, merits a nostalgic drink in the bar. For us, though, the highlight of the journey was a five-mile walk through the near-deserted countryside to St Simeon’s Monastery, an hour or so west of Aleppo.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

The first place we visited was a barren cliff face with a Roman eagle and the figure of a Roman officer called Titus Flavius Julianus, above a crudely cut rock tomb. He’d probably deserted from the legion in the late second century and lived a quiet life with his local wife, who was buried next to him.

By contrast, two centuries later and a few miles away, a young monk called Simeon made a name for himself with his extreme fasting and by wearing a spiked girdle that drew blood when he moved.

He spent the last 37 years of his life living 50 ft off the ground on an exposed pillar, where he ranted at the thousands of pilgrims. After his death in 459, Zeno, the Roman Emperor, decided to build a monastery around his pillar. Most of the walls and arches still stand today - a colossal structure, which could easily hold 10,000 worshippers.

Palmyra: The Corinthian columns stand tall from the ruins

It is extraordinary to think this masochistic exhibitionist inspired the construction of one of the greatest churches in Christendom. All that remains of St Simeon’s pillar is a stump as, over the centuries, millions of worshippers have chipped away stony mementos.

We then moved into the desert. After visiting the walled city of Resafe, our guide, unimpressed by the fly-blown cafe, managed to find some bananas, tins of sardines and freshly baked bread. But we didn’t have a knife, so we stopped at a tiny store on the edge of the desert to buy one. The shopkeeper would not hear of it and quickly invited us back to his modest two-roomed house covered in old carpets. The only gesture towards modernity was an enormous satellite dish.

Soon he was joined by his relatives and aged father, who was a resettled Bedouin. Nothing was too much trouble and tea was brought in along with tomatoes, scrambled eggs and ham. We learnt he was the local schoolteacher, and we left only after taking pictures of his extended family - with the schoolteacher embracing me in the traditional manner along with kisses on both cheeks.

We spent the remainder of our journey visiting impressive ruins at Qasr Al-Hayr and, at Palmyra, the greatest collection of Roman ruins in the Middle East. But even on extraordinary trips like this, it is these human encounters that make the most lasting impression.